Linux Torvalds has published a warning to open-source developers to avoid the first Linux Kernel 5.12 release candidate (RC).
Despite the snowstorms that lashed Texas and Portland and knocked out power to Torvalds’ residence for more than six days, Linux Kernel 5.12 was released on time. Torvalds and thousands of contributors managed to release the Linux 5.12 rc1 on time. However, Torvalds now says in the mailing list that RC 5.12 is a double ungood that can have disastrous outcomes for a computer’s filesystem.
“v5.12-rc1” tag renamed to “v5.12-rc1-dontuse”
Torvalds declared that in his public git, the “v5.12-rc1” tag has been renamed to “v5.12-rc1-dontuse”. The release incorporates a “harmful bug” and swap files stopped working right and even the offset of the origin of the swap file was lost. Swapping nevertheless happened, however it happened to the incorrect or wrong part of the filesystem.
Linus Torvalds, Developer, Linux kernel, said, yes, it is pretty much miserable; however, the bug was really unnoticeable and even it didn’t show up in normal testing, specifically because the swapfiles merely aren’t normal.
So, he is not criticizing the developers for the nasty bug in Linux 5.12-rc1, it was just because of a harmful bug that did get caught and is fixed in the current tree.
He concluded his statement by saying, yes rc1 tends to be buggier than the later RC’s; however, he didn’t expect Linux 5.12-rc1 to be so annoying that it could damage a computer’s filesystem.
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